Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  There was no address, no date and no salutation. You think yourself very high and mighty but your airs and graces are quite a joke when you know you are really nobody. You are not your mother’s child or your father’s. They got you from somewhere when their own one died. Off a rubbish heap, for all you know. It’s time you knew the truth.

  It was printed, in ink and with a fountain pen, on Basildon Bond writing paper, blue, the octavo size. The envelope matched it and the postmark was Swanny’s own district, London NW3.

  The second time she read it Swanny began to shake. She sat on the chair by the escritoire and her whole body shook. Her teeth chattered. After a little while she got up, went into the bathroom and drew herself a glass of water. It was 12.15 and her guests were due to begin arriving at half past. She told herself the only thing to do with the letter was tear it up and put it and its contents entirely out of her mind.

  This she couldn’t do—the tearing up part, that is. She found herself physically unable to do it. Touching the letter was bad enough. She had to approach it with a tremulous hand as someone might attempt daringly to touch the object of a phobia, extending one finger and immediately drawing it back. Her head bent, not looking, she scrabbled up the sheet of paper and stuffed it into her handbag. It was gone, she breathed a little more freely, but what she had read remained in her mind.

  Before the first guest arrives she is downstairs in the drawing room and Mormor is with her. Mormor is in one of those fringed black numbers, the blue brooch pinned on somewhere, her white hair cunningly woven and puffed under a fine net with brilliants on it, and talking animatedly about the snaps they are to drink with their first course, a particularly good brand she thinks it is that Torben has got in. And she begins to tell a story about her own mother that she calls ‘your Mormor’, about how she never touched any alcohol but snaps for which she had this remarkable capacity, but all Swanny hears is this woman being described as her grandmother which she may not be, which if the letter is true, she cannot be.

  The guests come. They congregate in the drawing room, having pre-lunch drinks and smoking cigarettes. These are the sixties, so nobody thinks twice about driving home over the limit or ‘under the influence’, as it was called then. Everyone drinks several sherries or gins and tonics and inhales on high-tar king-size. Nobody minds that Swanny’s pretty drawing room fills with smoke so that the Carl Larsson on the wall disappears in a fog.

  Swanny moves among her guests in a daze, trying to be a good hostess, speaking to each one in turn. She finds it hard to keep her eyes off her mother. She is drawn to gaze at her mother as a lover can’t keep from gazing at his love. It is as if she is fascinated by her mother.

  Mormor is part of a group and she is holding forth. Her high ‘Louis’ heels raise her up and she is no longer tiny, she is a commanding figure, a force to be reckoned with. Everyone seems to want to hear what she has to say, including the professor of maritime history, Mrs Jørgensen, Aase Jørgensen, who is the guest of honour at this party. And Mormor is talking about all the things that were happening in the world while she was a young woman in Hackney: the fuss over who would be King of Norway, the American airship disaster, the Potemkin in Odessa Harbour.

  Someone says, ‘The Battleship Potemkin, do you mean?’

  They have seen the film, but Mormor, who has never even heard of the film, says, ‘A ship, yes, it was a ship. That was in 1905, in the hot summer,’ and she is going to say more but Swanny touches her arm and whispers, can she have a word?

  At this particular moment? She said she could wait no longer, she was in anguish, she was stifling. She has heard all this about the battleship Potemkin but now there is no one in the room but her mother, she can literally see no one else. But what can she hope for? An explanation? A dismissal of what she has read as nonsense, not worth thinking of for another moment? She doesn’t know. She only knows she must get her mother away and ask her.

  Why? Why not wait until the party is over? Mormor thinks that, for she tells her impatiently that whatever it is can wait, she is talking, she is telling Mrs Jørgensen about the shelling of Odessa. And she embarrasses Swanny by saying loudly, ‘My petticoat isn’t showing, is it? Is that what’s the matter?’

  Swanny can’t move her. She goes out to the kitchen, ostensibly to find out if lunch can be served in ten minutes. All is well, there is nothing to do. She does something quite alien to her, something she swears she has never done before, takes a swig of snaps, splashing it into a sherry glass and tossing it down.

  She must, of course, go back into the drawing room. Her mother is no longer there, no longer even in the room. She walks about, looking for her. But there are, after all, only eleven people including herself. Perhaps her mother is out in the hall, looking for her, having relented, but before she can leave the room the waitress has appeared to announce luncheon and she must lead her guests into the dining room. Mormor is already there with Mrs Jørgensen, showing her the Royal Copenhagen china in the limited editions and talking about some woman porcelain collector who married a man called Erik Holst, himself a naval officer and one-time cadet on the doomed training ship Georg Stage.

  If she had been able to get her mother alone in those moments she would have asked her. She would have been able to ask her. As it was, when the party was over, some inhibition crushed her and tied her tongue. That first snaps and the rest she had drunk stunned her, all she wanted was to lie down, sleep, find forgetfulness or hope that she would feel differently when she woke up.

  The evening passed. Torben was spending a rare few hours away from home. Mormor reclined on the sofa reading The Old Curiosity Shop and went up to her bedroom early, saying she had had a tiring day. She needed, no doubt, a couple of hours’ solitude in which to write her diary. Swanny had a racking headache. She hadn’t looked at the letter again. It was in her handbag and her handbag was with her in the drawing room, as it always was wherever she might be, on the floor beside her chair or on a sofa cushion. She said she kept looking at it and thinking of the thing inside it. It was as if a bag of vomit or some dead decaying thing had been thrust into her handbag and sometime or other she was going to have to clean it out.

  Long before Torben got home she took two aspirins and went to bed. Although they shared a room, she and Torben had never shared a bed. She woke up very early in the morning, at five or earlier, and she nearly went up to the next floor to wake her mother, to say to her, read this and tell me if it’s true. Is it true? Tell me it isn’t true. I must know.

  But she didn’t. Not then.

  6

  BY CHANCE I HAPPENED to be at home when Swanny came round to tell us about the letter. It was a usual Wednesday afternoon. Swanny had even taken care not to arrange a special time. Although it had been a Friday when the letter came, she still waited until the following Wednesday to tell anyone. She made herself wait. As she said, she didn’t ‘want to make a thing of it’. She hadn’t shown the letter to Torben or said anything to Mormor. Nor had she phoned my mother to warn her she had something she particularly wanted to talk about. Of course the truth was she didn’t want to talk about it, she wanted to forget it, but couldn’t. Who could forget a thing like that?

  Her bright silver hair was always beautifully cut. Strangely, this made it look not as if it were naturally that colour but as if it had been artificially made that way. The effect of dark red lipstick against that lightly tanned skin was arresting. Torben’s rings on her left hand were platinum and diamonds, large bright diamonds, and she wore diamond earrings that Nancy Mitford said somewhere were just the thing for an ageing face. I used to think that I’d like to look like her when I was her age but I’m only ten years off it now and I don’t. Not at all. It would be surprising if I did.

  She took the letter out of her bag with the very tips of her fingers. She made her fingers into tongs, yet it wasn’t a theatrical or affected gesture but a natural expression of disgust. My mother tried to make light of it.

  ‘I’
ve never seen one of these before.’

  ‘Don’t mock, Marie, please don’t. I can’t bear it.’

  ‘Swanny,’ said my mother, ‘you don’t mean you believe this rubbish?’

  Swanny’s eyes went rather helplessly from my mother to me. She put her hands down and clasped them together as if without that clutch they might fly apart and spring up again. ‘Why would this person say it if it wasn’t true? Whoever it is, they wouldn’t just make it up.’

  ‘Of course they would. It’s someone who’s envious of you.’

  ‘It’s someone who saw your picture in the Tatler,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, surely not. How would they know where I lived? How could they know anything about me?’

  ‘Honestly, Swan, you tell me not to mock but actually I could just burst out laughing. No one but you would give it a moment’s credence. I mean, if it was me I’d just have burnt it.’

  Swanny said very quietly, and that was when we knew how seriously she took it, how she must have been thinking about it, ‘It wouldn’t have come to you, would it? You look just like Mor.’

  Then my mother did laugh, if a bit hollowly. ‘The obvious thing is to ask her. If you really take this seriously, ask her.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I can’t think why you haven’t already. If it was me I’d have asked her straight away.’

  ‘Don’t keep saying if it was you, Marie.’

  ‘All right. Sorry. Just ask her. You should have asked her last Friday, but ask her now.’

  Swanny made a movement of her head, a tiny shake. She said, very quietly, ‘I was afraid.’

  ‘Oh, but you must ask her. You must. Is this really worrying you?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Of course you must ask her. Now. As soon as you get home. Show her the letter. It’ll turn out that this anonymous beast, this pig, this totally mad person, meant something quite different.’

  Swanny said simply, looking from one to the other of us, ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. How should I know? But it’s obviously nonsense. You’re Mor’s favourite, you’ve said so yourself, you know you are. She’s always saying it, she doesn’t care whose feelings she hurts. I mean, is it likely she adopted you? Why would she? Look at it like that, why can’t you? She could have kids of her own, she was always having them, even now she often moans about the number of kids she had and blames it on Far.’

  ‘You’ll have to ask her,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘D’you want me to ask her?’ my mother said.

  Swanny lifted her shoulders, shook her head.

  ‘I don’t mind asking her. I’ll come back with you and ask her if you like.’

  Of course Swanny wasn’t going to have that. My mother would have done it. If it had been she who got the letter, she would have asked her straight out, on the spot. I loved my mother and remember her with affection, she was a good mother to me and she was unusually unselfish, but it’s no use pretending she was sensitive or had much imagination. Swanny had the sensitivity, the reticence, was the imaginative, diffident one. Curiously, though, all these traits were present in Asta, who was sensitive and insensitive, gentle and hard, tough and vulnerable, aggressive and shy—the writer of fiction and non-fiction.

  My mother couldn’t understand the kind of fear Swanny had. She could only be indignant, sense that some outrage was being perpetrated, be aware of a great injustice looming. She wanted to set things right by having it out with her mother now, before another night had passed.

  Swanny said, ‘I’ll ask her. You’ve shown me I have to ask her.’ She sighed. Her face had taken on that haunted look we were often to see now. ‘I don’t like to make a thing of my age, I’m not old yet, fifty-eight’s not old, but I’m too old to have this happen to me. You hear of teenagers finding out they were adopted. Not people of fifty-eight, for God’s sake. It’s not just horrible, it’s grotesque.’ Although her tone didn’t change, nor her expression, incredulous and attempting a faint ironical amusement, her words made her at last pathetic. ‘I can’t have been adopted, can I, Marie? Can I, Ann? It has to be that the letter-writer’s lying. Oh, if only I hadn’t opened it!’

  You would have expected my mother and me to have discussed all this after she had gone but we didn’t. My mother said only that the letter writer probably thought it was true—why did we assume it was a woman?—but that the story probably derived from an invention of Asta’s. You could imagine Asta romancing on about foundlings, several of her stories were about that very subject, and some listeners actually took them seriously. She said it lightly enough, trivializing the whole thing, to make further serious conversation about it impossible. The subject was changed. The fiancé, he who was to be the last of them, the final lover that she was going to marry ‘one day’ to make it all respectable perhaps, he arrived and shortly afterwards I left. Not another word was said about Swanny and quite a long time went by before I heard the outcome.

  If this had been one of Asta’s stories it would have involved a tremendous scene with a climax, an opening of the heart and ultimately some sort of confession. But it wasn’t, it was life itself, which she so loved to embroider. Swanny told my mother that after another two days’ delay she came out with it and asked Asta. When it came to it she was actually trembling, she felt sick. The night before, repeatedly telling herself this would be the last night before she knew, she had hardly slept.

  Then, in the morning, she nearly fell into further procrastination. Wasn’t anything better than to know? But could she bear to go on not knowing? She and her mother were alone in the house. The ‘daily’ woman didn’t come every day. Swanny pursued her usual tasks, those aspects of housework she enjoyed, polishing certain pieces of furniture, tidying up to improve the look of one of the large reception rooms, taking a delivery of flowers and putting them into her Chinese vases. It was high summer but not at all warm. The grass was bright green and the trees in rich full leaf and the garden full of flowers, but the sky was leaden grey and it was cool.

  Asta was still upstairs in her room on the third floor. She often didn’t appear till coffee time but always by then, invariably to come out with some remark about the impossibility of a Dane’s existing without coffee. Fantasies flowed through Swanny’s mind, one after another. Asta had gone away and married Uncle Harry. Asta had died up there. Asta was lying there dead. She thought, not that she would grieve or miss her, but that then she would never know the truth of it.

  As the time approached eleven she grew even more sick with tension. It was all stupid, she knew that. Here she was, a woman in late middle age, going out of her mind with anxiety because a week before a poison-pen letter had told her she wasn’t her parents’ child. The letter itself she had read and re-read, had quite got over comparing it to a bag of vomit or a dead rat, had become entirely familiar with it, had long known the words by heart.

  Asta came down at two minutes to eleven, her white hair netted, her face well-powdered, dressed in dark blue (‘a dark-blue walking costume’) with the butterfly-wing brooch holding a navy-blue scarf in place. Her butterfly-wing eyes were so bright that on some days the beam from them itself looked blue, a shaft of coloured light.

  She only ever said two things at this point, so it must have been one or other of them: the remark about the indispensability of coffee to Danes or, ‘Do I smell the good coffee?’

  Swanny brought the coffee in. It was soon to be Asta’s eighty-third birthday and she intended to have what she called a chocolate party. That is, Swanny was to have a chocolate party for her. I had once been to one of these and very good it was. No one would give a feast like this today, for the drink was sweet hot chocolate into which you put a huge dollop of whipped cream and the food was kransekage, a wonderful cake made of an almond-paste mixture and shaped like a multi-layered crown. Asta was talking about this, whom they should invite and so on, what other food should be served. Swanny interrupted her to say she had somet
hing she wanted to ask her, speaking so breathlessly that even Asta could tell something was wrong. She asked her what was wrong.

  Then Swanny came out with it. She said it was the hardest thing she’d ever had to ask anyone. She said she thought it would kill her. Her blood pressure rose and her head drummed. The words came out hoarsely.

  Asta was silent. She had a look on her face, Swanny said afterwards, of someone who had been caught out in a forbidden act, a how-can-I-get-out-of-this-one look, a child taking one of mother’s chocolates. Her eyes moved, the blue gaze cast up, then shifting to the right, to the left. She looked appalled, she looked trapped, Swanny said, and then she burst out laughing.

  ‘Oh, don’t laugh,’ Swanny cried out. ‘Please don’t. I’ve been in such a state. I’ve lain awake nights. But if it’s a lie you can laugh. Is it a lie?’

  Asta, of course, said the worst thing she could. She often did. ‘If you want it to be, lille Swanny. If that makes you happy it can be a lie. What is truth anyway?’

  ‘Moder,’ said Swanny, and she hardly ever called Asta by the more formal word, ‘I have a right to know, I must know. Please look at this letter.’

  Asta took it and looked at it. Of course she couldn’t see it without her glasses and these had to be groped for in her handbag, taken out of their case, perched on her nose. She read the letter and then she did what seemed an awful thing to Swanny. Before Swanny could stop her she had torn it in two, in four, across again, reduced it to tiny pieces.

  Swanny gave a cry and tried to take the pieces of paper from her but Asta, just like a child in the school playground, like a teasing, crowing child, held up the paper scraps high above her head, shaking the hand that clutched them like someone waving frenetically. She waved the scraps in the air, uttering a high-pitched amused, ‘No, no, no, no!’

  ‘Why did you do that? Please give me those pieces. I must have that letter. I must put it together again.’